Jaguars, pumas, and ocelots are the main large predators within Belize, Central America that co-exist together and compete for resources. In this study, we have two main objectives. First, to determine how occupancy and/or detection of top predators (jaguars) influences mesopredators (pumas and ocelots), hypothesizing that jaguars will directly lower pumas occupancy and/or detection, pumas will directly lower ocelots occupancy and/or detection, and jaguars will indirectly positively influence ocelots occupancy and/or detection by suppression of pumas. Second, to determine how occupancy and/or detection is influenced by sex within a species, hypothesizing that males will have higher occupancy and detection at stations where females are present and females will have lower occupancy and detection at stations where males are present. We formatted raw photo data into “capture histories” for three target species at each camera station across four study sites utilizing data collected from non-invasive trail cameras in 2016. We then used 2-species co-occurrence models to calculate occupancy, detection, and species interaction factors (SIFs) in program PRESENCE and compared the results from 16 different models for each species pairing and each sex pairing to find the top model(s), with ΔAIC value less than 2.0.
Results/Conclusions
Data analysis is currently on-going, but from the first of four study sites we have found that occupancy was too high to effectively model these paired interactions, but detection rates gave interesting insight into both 2-species and within species interactions. The detection rates between jaguars and pumas and pumas and ocelots showed strong positive co-detection. Interestingly, ocelots showed they had a strong co-detection when jaguars were present, but the opposite was true for jaguars when ocelots were present. The detection rate between sexes within species had variable results. For jaguars, both sexes had lower detection at sites with the opposite sex, which is not what we expected for males, but is what we expected for females. For pumas, results were mixed with two models showing male detection increased when females were present, while two other models showed that male detection decreased when females were present, which was likely a results of the small sample size for female pumas. Ocelots were the only within species interaction that matched our expectations, with male detection increasing when females were present and female detection decreasing when males were present. Our results provide insight into species co-existence among competitors and also sex-mediated detection within species.